Bayard Rustin on Withholding Votes For Political Leverage
It's about choosing the coalition you'll fight with and among another day.
I wanted to pull out an excerpt from Bayard Rustin’s 1965 essay “From Protest To Politics” that might be useful for anti-war and pro-Palestine organizers. The parallels between the civil rights movement's push to oust Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party and today's efforts to diminish AIPAC's influence are clearly not identical, but Rustin's insights on elections, social movements, and political parties remain relevant.
For activists skeptical of electoral politics, Rustin's suggestion that engaging with political parties doesn’t mean the civil rights movement would ascend into the Democratic Party establishment might not resonate given moderating influence the Congressional Black Caucus has recently played within the Democratic Party. It’s important to remember this wasn’t always the case (see the CBC’s relationship to the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson or Barack Obama, for instance). Like the laws of gravity, the realities of political parties remain. We can choose to engage with them or ignore them.
To explore the full dynamics of coalitions and political power, one must consider the scenarios under which AIPAC’s influence could significantly diminish or leave the Democratic Party. This could occur if one or more of the following events transpire:
Center-left, Zionist, pro-Israel institutions like J Street take a much more active role organizing money, votes, and networks against AIPAC’s influence in the Democratic Party (this year, J Street has played a neutral role while Jewish Democratic Council of America has aligned with AIPAC as they spends millions in Republican donor money against progressive Democrats critical of the Israeli government).
The mobilization of money, votes, and networks by Arab and Muslim Democrats and/or younger, progressive Democrats surpasses the efforts of pro-Israel organizations. A notable rise in the influence of these groups could form a substantial counterforce to AIPAC’s sway, thereby redefining the priorities and policies of the Democratic Party, but it likely would have to look something a bit more like the DREAMer or Sunrise Movement.
AIPAC and its brand of extreme pro-Israel politics become so divisive within the Democratic Party that they experience a significant shift in alignment, similar to other once-prominent interest groups. Just as Big Oil, the NRA, and even charter schools have gradually migrated towards the Republican Party AIPAC’s influence could wane within Democratic ranks.
Here’s the most important excerpt from Rustin on the strategy to withhold votes for political leverage:
Some who take this position urged last year that votes be withheld from the Johnson-Humphrey ticket as a demonstration of the Negro’s political power. …Thus coalitions are inescapable, however tentative they may be…
The issue is which coalition to join and how to make it responsive to your program. Necessarily there will be compromise.
But the difference between expediency and morality in politics is the difference between selling out a principle and making smaller concessions to win larger ones. The leader who shrinks from this task reveals not his purity but his lack of political sense.
Rustin's insights reveal that elections are fundamentally about choosing coalitions, not just casting votes. He recognized that while coalitions require compromise, the key is to make strategic concessions without abandoning core principles. Rustin, a master organizer, balanced moral clarity with political pragmatism, always with a focus on building powerful institutions and campaigns that the political establishment could not ignore.
Rustin’s remarks reminds me of this excerpt from Daniel Schlozman’s book When Movements Anchor Parties about how social movements go from the margins of public opinion toward winning policy outcomes:
“Movements join with political parties only on terms acceptable to winning coalitions inside those parties. Political parties want to win election. Otherwise, the politicians and interests that constitute them have no hope of wielding power or setting policy. And pragmatists inside party coalitions know this lesson best of all.
Parties accept alliance only with the support of a winning coalition inside the party, including hard-nosed realists as well as ideological sympathizers. If the movement threatens the pragmatists’ core interests, whether electoral or pecuniary, then the party seeks other paths to majority. No movements that meet the terms parties set, no alliance.
If parties believe that movement radicals imperil their electoral prospects, then movement moderates must jettison their brethren if they want to sustain alliance with a major party.
Anchoring groups pay a high price to join together with parties. Yet given the rules of the game, it is a price well worth paying.”
Rustin’s full remarks on coalitions and majoritarian politics:
Neither that movement nor the country’s twenty million black people can win political power alone. We need allies. The future of the Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States. I speak of the coalition which staged the March on Washington, passed the Civil Rights Act, and laid the basis for the Johnson landslide — Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.
There are those who argue that a coalition strategy would force the Negro to surrender his political independence to white liberals, that he would be neutralized, deprived of his cutting edge, absorbed into the Establishment. Some who take this position urged last year that votes be withheld from the Johnson-Humphrey ticket as a demonstration of the Negro’s political power.
Curiously enough, these people who sought to demonstrate power through the non-exercise of it, also point to the Negro “swing vote” in crucial urban areas as the source of the Negro’s independent political power. But here they are closer to being right: the urban Negro vote will grow in importance in the coming years.
If there is anything positive in the spread of the ghetto, it is the potential political power base thus created, and to realize this potential is one of the most challenging and urgent tasks before the civil rights movement. If the movement can wrest leadership of the ghetto vote from the machines, it will have acquired an organized constituency such as other major groups in our society now have.
But we must also remember that the effectiveness of a swing vote depends solely on “other” votes. It derives its power from them. In that sense, it can never be “independent,” but must opt for one candidate or the other, even if by default. Thus coalitions are inescapable, however tentative they may be.
And this is the case in all but those few situations in which Negroes running on an independent ticket might conceivably win. “Independence,” in other words, is not a value in itself.
The issue is which coalition to join and how to make it responsive to your program. Necessarily there will be compromise. But the difference between expediency and morality in politics is the difference between selling out a principle and making smaller concessions to win larger ones. The leader who shrinks from this task reveals not his purity but his lack of political sense.
The task of molding a political movement out of the March on Washington coalition is not simple, but no alternatives have been advanced. We need to choose our allies on the basis of common political objectives. It has become fashionable in some no-win Negro circles to decry the white liberal as the main enemy (his hypocrisy is what sustains racism); by virtue of this reverse recitation of the reactionary’s litany (liberalism leads to socialism, which leads to Communism) the Negro is left in majestic isolation, except for a tiny band of fervent white initiates.
But the objective fact is that Eastland and Goldwater are the main enemies — they and the opponents of civil rights, of the war on poverty, of medicare, of social security, of federal aid to education, of unions, and so forth. The labor movement, despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single organized force in this country pushing for progressive social legislation. And where the Negro-labor-liberal axis is weak, as in the farm belt, it was the religious groups that were most influential in rallying support for the Civil Rights Bill.
It may be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party of Negroes and white moderates and a Republican Party of refugee racists and economic conservatives, but there certainly is a strong tendency toward such a realignment; and an additional 3.6 million Negroes of voting age in the eleven Southern states are still to be heard from.
Even the tendency toward disintegration of the Democratic party’s racist wing defines a new context for Presidential and liberal strategy in the congressional battles ahead. Thus the Negro vote (North as well as South), while not decisive in the Presidential race, was enormously effective. It was a dramatic element of a historic mandate which contains vast possibilities and dangers that will fundamentally affect the future course of the civil rights movement.
None of this guarantees vigorous executive or legislative action, for the other side of the Johnson landslide is that it has a Gaullist quality. Goldwater’s capture of the Republican party forced into the Democratic camp many disparate elements which do not belong there, Big Business being the major example. Johnson, who wants to be President “of all people,” may try to keep his new coalition together by sticking close to the political center.
But if he decides to do this, it is unlikely that even his political genius will be able to hold together a coalition so inherently unstable and rife with contradictions. It must come apart.
Should it do so while Johnson is pursuing a centrist course, then the mandate will have been wastefully dissipated. However, if the mandate is seized upon to set fundamental changes in motion, then the basis can be laid for a new mandate, a new coalition including hitherto inert and dispossessed strata of the population.
We need to protest the notion that our integration into American life, so long delayed, must now proceed in an atmosphere of competitive scarcity instead of in the security of abundance which technology makes possible. We cannot claim to have answers to all the complex problems of modern society. That is too much to ask of a movement still battling barbarism in Mississippi.
But we can agitate the right questions by probing at the contradictions which still stand in the way of the “Great Society.” The questions having been asked, motion must begin in the larger society, for there is a limit to what Negroes can do alone.
Barbarism is still being battled in Mississippi and in Israel/Palestine. That should be a reminder of how political and legislative change are only one important facet of much deeper and much broader cultural and psychic changes we need to survive. As for the battle against AIPAC (to reform it or at least whittle down its sway in the Democratic Party, there is an aspect where morality and effectiveness converge. This is in those ideals related to compassionate justice (a major theme of the Hebrew prophets and in other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures). I think this requires two related stances in addition to being clarion clear about the urgency of recognizing the full humanity of Palestinian Arabs along with the necessity of their enjoying full citizenship in a state functional and resourced enough to protect their rights and dignity.
1. An strong affirmation that Jews born in Israel/Palestine retain the same basic rights whether it be in a state where they comprise a majority or in a *truly* Greater Israel where there are special “carve outs” for the specific sensitivities of both Jews and Muslims (and perhaps also Christians and other groups like the Bahais?)
2. A powerful effort to sensitively correct and reject antisemitic rhetoric, gestures, or actions. I’m using the word “sensitive” but perhaps I should use words like “broadminded,” “strategic,” or “thoughtful.” Some antisemitism is expressed by provocateurs eager to discredit pro Palestinian movements. Those need to be vigorously contested. Other times antisemitism crops up because of a careless or over exited use of language or symbols. In those cases there is a need and a responsibility to follow the rebuttal and rejection of the offensive/misguided expression with efforts to educate ourselves about the historical role of antisemitism in many forms of imperial domination dating back to ancient times—and how the MANY forms of antisemitism had inculcated serious intergenerational trauma among Jews even well before the Nazi Holocaust.
Again, the idea is to reconcile morality with pragmatism as much as possible. Therefore the second point about contesting and correcting antisemitism is of prime importance. Today we look at Gaza while trying to account for the intergenerational trauma that is sure to resonate throughout the rest of this century and probably beyond. We are also seeing how the Palestinian Cause is resonating in the minority populations of the US, in Ireland, and in South Africa because we are beginning to build broad understandings of the deleterious effects of imperialism and settler colonialism that persist over many generations. But before the state of Israel, the “poster child” for the victims of ruthless imperialism was the Jew which drove many Jews to pioneer in developing a moral, symbolic, and legal vocabulary for combating systemized official injustice and atrocities (including “genocide”) — and which continues to drive many Jews today to continue to develop these principles in concert with people from other faiths, traditions, and disciplines.
Just as it is cruel and unjust to punish innocent civilians for the crimes of Hamas (and other groups) on 10/6, it is also cruel and unjust to hold all Israelis or (worse) all Jews responsible for the crimes of the Israeli government. Yes, an antisemitic slur hurled at the heat of the moment is not as horrific as the wholesale murder going on in Gaza. But even if those kinds of abuses were not being systematically used to harden the case for what supporters of Israel erroneously call “self defense,” they put a burden on us to try to heal what we can heal on a face-to-face level whenever we can as we seek to help efforts to heal a crazed and wounded world with crazed wounded nations and identities (including a crazed and wounded Democratic Party.)